20 
House & Garden 
YOUR GARDEN 
B Y October work in the garden slows down. Fields turn from green 
to dun. Crops that once flourished on hillside and valley are hidden 
away in barn and byre. The constant urging of Nature is stilled; it is 
drifting off into the sleep of winter, the sleep that will restore strength 
and energy for the coming year. 
Unquestionably this is the saddest season of the year for the man who 
has devoted long hours in bringing his garden up to perfection. But it 
can also be a season of great profit to him. For this is the time to take 
account of the year’s profit and loss, the time to make up the balance 
sheet of the garden. 
T HE necessity for making war gardens was one of the most remarka¬ 
ble blessings in disguise that has ever been visited upon the Ameri¬ 
can people. Thousands of men and women who never gardened before 
were moved by the patriotic impulse to grow their own vegetables and 
thus lighten the burden thrown on the farmers. In all sections of the 
land waste stretches were faithfully cultivated, and in many places lawns 
and flower gardens were dug up and laid down to potatoes, beets, corn 
and the other more humble but necessary growing things. 
Not all these gardens were a success. Hundreds of “potatriots” lost 
interest when hot weather began to make garden work uncomfortable, 
or when disease and pest gained an inroad on the tender crops. Some of 
the failure was due to ignorance of soil requirements, some to the methods 
of cultivation, some to the whole broad concept of gardening itself. 
These discouraging lessons were costly in time and effort, but they were 
no more costly than the lessons learned by men and women in other 
kinds of war work. 
The main benefit and doubtless the biggest was the fact that Americans 
fell into the habit of gardening. They suddenly learned that there was 
a wealth beneath their feet if only they took the trouble to dig it out. 
A CERTAIN man, learned in financial matters, tells me that there 
are many things that can never be put down on a balance sheet, 
that behind the rows of figures are tales of high adventure, and noble 
sacrifice and the pictures of beautiful and terrible experiences. Much 
of the same things will be written between the lines of your garden 
balance sheet. There is more to your profit than the many bushels of 
potatoes and the many messes of greens you gathered from your patch; 
there is more to your loss than that row of corn and that batch of beans 
the cutworms ruthlessly destroyed. 
Put down in your profit column the fact that you have discovered the 
pleasure of gardening. This means the cleansing touch of rich soil on 
your hands and the fragrance of newly turned earth in your nostrils. 
BALANCE SHEET 
It means the caress of the warm sun on your back and the cool of evening 
in your face. It means a friendship with strange personalities whose 
life has hitherto been a sealed book to you—gardeners and growing 
things. 
G ARDENERS are as clanny as fishermen. They distrust the 
stranger and the amateur. They listen to your tales with suspi¬ 
cion, and not until you have proven yourself one of their own kind do 
they take you into the circle of their friendship. The war has extended 
this circle. It means that many more people than ever before will feel 
the stir of each new April through their bodies and become intimate 
with earth. 
And the friendship with growing things means the opening up of a 
complete new world to you. What man or woman but has felt, as he 
watched the weakly blade develop into sturdy stalk and the blossom 
set to burnished fruit, the tremendous mystery of Nature’s way? Is this 
banal? Not at all. The man who scoffs at it may live on in his blind¬ 
ness. The garden is a great uncharted sea, and he who would venture 
upon it has many a splendid experience ahead. Here are new lands and 
new peoples, new birds and new beasts, new codes and new principles. 
Set foot on those shores, and henceforth you journey by a new way. 
B Y no means will war gardening stop with this harvest. Should peace 
come tomorrow, the necessity for Americans to raise their own little 
store of vegetables will be quite as acute as it was this year. Perhaps 
even a greater burden will be thrown on our farmers when the days of 
restoration and the feeding of famished lands shall commence. Even if 
this circumstance did not exist, why should gardening of this sort be 
simply a temporary heroic measure? Is it to be expected that once men 
and women have found the benefit and profit from gardening they will 
let the opportunity slide by? 
S IT down one of these autumn afternoons and cast up your war gar¬ 
dening accounts. Figure out actual costs and actual profits in 
dollars and cents. And then balance the books. 
They will show a loss? All right. Then put against that loss those 
things which cannot be set down in figures. Put down the pageant of 
the seasons that you have witnessed, the strange loveliness of new buds, 
the flaming of poppies in wheat fields, the caricatures that Nature makes 
in root grotesques, the hardened muscle and the sun-browned arm, the 
pride of the early crop, the dry heat of mid-day and the crisp coolness 
of autumn nights. Put down these items, and then see what the balance 
sheet will show! 
DOWN THE DALES THE AUTUMN GOES 
Down the dales the Autumn goe, 
Fair as only she is fair; 
Glints of amber in her hair, 
On her cheeks the tints of rose; 
In her wide and wistful eyes 
Gentian colors such as look 
From the mirror of the brook 
When the noon is in the skies. 
To the song of bird and stream, 
Melody of cricket strings, 
And the pine’s low murmurings, 
On she moves as in a dream, 
Bearing dreams of long repose 
In the dim white halls of Sleep;— 
With no harvests left to reap 
Down the dales the Autumn goes! 
—Clinton Scollard. 
